Architecture and Typology in ‘Mark’s Court

• Published in: The Powys journal Vol. 31; pp. 32 - 60
• Main Author: BEDDOW, ROBERT
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bridgwater Powys Society 01.01.2021; The Powys Society
• Subjects: 19th century; Architecture; Austen, Jane (1775-1817); Functional heads; Genre; Interiority; Lawrence, D H (1885-1930); Literary criticism; Medieval literature; Miscommunication; Sarcophagi; Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768); Walpole, Horace (1717-1797)
• ISSN: 0962-7057

A Glastonbury Romance, Chapter 15 It is in the nature of the Romance genre (if indeed it is a genre) to be loosely organised and episodic; not episodic in the manner of the Picaresque, where the reader or audience waits for the entertainment of the next escape, scrape or capture of the comic anti-hero, but episodic in that a ripple of narrative will at times unpredictably break into rapids of increased attentiveness and significance. When Tennyson recast Malory in his Idylls of the King he imposed on the medieval writer's work a novelistic shape and climactic ending as the dying Arthur is carried across the mere of Avalon by the three queens in the barge. Many of the signposts to meaning in the description of Mark's Court rely on a playful manipulation of real and imagined architectural space, but before we undertake that examination, something needs to be said about the role of architectural representation in nineteenth-century literature.The great Romantics have had a bad press for their descriptions of gothic, but that has arisen chiefly from a misunderstanding of Northanger Abbey. Examined carefully, the best writing of the Romantic poets responds with deep sympathy to medieval art and architecture - for instance Keats'love of stained glass in The Eve of Saint Agnes, Wordsworth's insight into perpendicular gothic in his sonnet on King's College Chapel, and perhaps most heartfelt of all, Byrons description of the broken rose window at Newstead Abbey in Don Juan.5 Like the literature of the Romantics, the architecture of the period 1799-1824" is rarely doctrinaire but often imaginative, often breezily impressionistic: e.g. the work of Thomas Rickman, which as we shall see has important bearings for AGR.